Grammar of gratitude: expressing thanks in PhD dissertation acknowledgments

PhD dissertation acknowledgments (DAs) are communicative acts that repeatedly instantiate the speech act of thanking. Their strategic building block is the acknowledgment move (AM), which typically expresses gratitude, identifies benefactors and mentions benefits [e.g. “Also, I would like to thank my fellow doctoral students [...] for making my stay [...] a very enjoyable experience.”] and may include supportive moves which expand on the basic content of their main functional constituents. In this study I outline lexico-syntactic and semantic features of the 405 AMs found in 40 DAs written in English, representative of 8 disciplines, dating back to the 1990’s. By applying the principles and methodology of Pattern Grammar (Hunston, Francis 2000) — which aims to reveal the surface relationships between neighboring (groups of) words, and the mappings between lexical items, patterns and meaning units (i.e. such as participants, processes, circumstances) — I identify and represent both the structural patterns associated with the lexemes encoding the notion of gratitude in AMs and the associations between such patterns and the main functional units of AMs (i.e. manifestation of gratitude, identification of benefits and specification of benefits). The data reveals the following selective co-distribution patterns. 1) The text segments making up the AMs may be phrases, clauses or sentences, which can be combined in various ways; yet, the number of functional units encoded in AMs does not depend on the latter’s syntactic elaboration. 2) AMs not realized as clauses tend to lack gratitude expressions. 3) In AMs realized as clauses, experiences of gratitude tend to be represented as processes (through VPs), while benefactors and benefits as entities involved in or circumstances characterizing those processes (through NPs and PPs, respectively). 4) In clausal AMs with no gratitude expressions, the benefactor units and benefit units are realized through complementary resources: if the former are encoded as NPs, the latter may be encoded as VPs or PPs; if the former are encoded as PPs, the latter may be encoded as NPs, PPs or relative clauses; and if the former are encoded as incomplete clauses, the latter are typically encoded as PPs. 5) Expressions of thanks (occurring in about 60% of the AMs) may focus on one of several aspects of gratitude: indicating benefactors’ merits (e.g. acknowledge, recognize), favorably evaluating their contributions (e.g. appreciate), indicating that the writer received more than he gave (e.g. debt, owe), manifesting pleased acceptance of the services offered (e.g. grateful, gratitude; I liked, I will always remember, I have benefited, It has been a pleasure and honor), expressing a favorable feeling towards the benefactors (e.g. thank, thanks, thank you); these notions can also be combined (e.g. gratefully acknowledge). 6) AMs containing gratitude expressions tend to be syntactically organized in the way required by the argument structure of the main lexical resources for expressing gratitude; if these are adjectives, they tend to be used after linking verbs and followed by PPs; if they are verbs, optionally modified by adverbs, they are preceded by NPs functioning as subjects and frequently followed by NPs and PPs functioning as direct and indirect objects, respectively; and if they are nouns, optionally modified by adjectives, they can occur in absolute constructions or in pre- or post-verbal position. 7) When their main lexical resources are non-linking verbs, gratitude expressions tend to be realized in the active voice, with the thankers thus represented as the main actors involved in the events being referred to. 8) Benefit units (expressed in about 85% of the AMs) realized as VPs or (incomplete) clauses are typically encoded in the active voice and from the benefactor’s perspective, the segments identifying the benefactors (occurring in about 80% of the AMs) tending to precede the relevant verbs. 9) In AMs containing all three main functional components, gratitude expressions tend to occur before benefactor units, which in turn precede benefit units; in those lacking a gratitude expression, benefactor units tend to precede benefit units. Thus, where applicable, the thanker is made more prominent in the discourse than the benefactor, and the latter tends to be more cognitively salient than the benefit. Finally, independently of their degree of syntactic elaborateness, AMs may be textually organized in complex ways: functional constituents may be encoded in discontinuous text segments that surround other constituents; in addition, in multi-sentence AMs, they may be instantiated more than once and even interleaved with other constituents. The findings show that AMs are encoded in distinctive and personalized ways through the use of a variety of lexico-syntactic resources. At the same time, their encoding patterns reveal certain shared preferences, especially with regard to the ordering options of the AMs’ functional constituents. Reference Hunston, S. Francis G., Pattern Grammar, Amsterdam: Benjamin